Chapter 4 #4
“I’ll look around for a wristband,” he said briskly, standing up. I gazed at the place where he’d put his hand on my wrist. It still felt warm. He must be one of those people who still had warm hands even after clutching the sides of a boat for an hour.
He came back with a small rubber bracelet from the boat crew. “Put this on.”
I looked at the bracelet and rolled it onto my wrist. “I feel like I’m in an aerobics video from 1985.”
“That’s good,” Paul said. “Nobody ever gets sick in aerobics videos.”
I smiled and then felt queasy again, so I did my very best to focus on the horizon and not get sick off the side of the boat. A few minutes later, though, it was too much, and I rushed to the very tiny boat toilet while Paul stood outside it, waiting for me.
“That is a tiny toilet.”
“It’s called the head.”
“What now?”
“The toilet in a boat.”
“What I just did gives the phrase giving head new meaning.”
He opened his mouth to reply, didn’t.
“You do this thing,” I said. “You look like you’re going to make the world’s dirtiest joke, and then you stop yourself.”
“I’m trying to be a nice, well-behaved Canadian.”
“Is that why you took me on a boat tour? Because I’m pretty sure this was a torture technique.”
He looked apologetic as he led me back to a seat outside in the back of the boat. “I’m genuinely sorry.”
“Not at all. I’m having fun, in between the vomiting. I promise.”
By the time I stepped off the boat, I was a bit unsteady, and Paul gently held my elbow to make sure I didn’t fall.
“I’m feeling very guilty. How do I make it up to you?”
“I’m easygoing. I just need your firstborn child and access to your bank account.”
He grinned. “You could do better than either of those things. I don’t know when a firstborn child will be on the offer. How about a classroom full of restless thirteen-year-olds? I don’t think their parents would miss them.”
“That’s another torture technique, isn’t it.”
“You caught me.”
He looked ready to apologize again, so I cut him off. “You know I’m teasing, right? I had a great time. I saw puffins and whales. I’m just a little disappointed that neither one was eating pizza.”
“I guess it may not be the right time to ask if you want lunch.”
“I will want lunch, sometime in the future. I can conceive of wanting lunch at some point before I die.”
I bought Paul a thank you lunch at a little local seafood restaurant.
Over lunch, he told me about his love for school teaching, which he’d been doing for four years, and how he originally studied acting in college and had tried his hand as an actor for a few years in Toronto before returning to Newfoundland to help care for his father, who was dying of cancer.
Since then, he’d been helping his mother to navigate life on her own.
“It seemed like the right thing to do, but I also started building a life here. Trish was…my ex… I felt bad, because I was half the reason she came to St. John’s in the first place. It’s not glamorous, compared to some other places.”
“I know people who lead glamorous lives,” I said. “They spend half their mornings with their head in a toilet and the other half asking their therapists whether anyone really likes them or just their Bombardier jet.”
Paul shrugged. “Anyway. My wife found it boring.”
“Or she found herself boring,” I said, “and went off looking to escape herself.”
Something flickered in Paul’s eyes, but I couldn’t read it. The same look. “So tell me about your work,” he said after a moment.
“Speaking of boring,” I said. And I told him about my financial writing job, and about my previous job as a journalist working for a fancy magazine.
“For a while, I specialized in interviewing very wealthy people about how they were getting their kids into college, or how they paid their nannies under the table. Illicit stuff, the rule-bending that goes into fancy people getting their way. It was morally abhorrent but really fun to read about. And for some reason I could get people to confess to all sorts of things, off the record. They liked talking to me. But then my love life went downhill, and I stopped being able to get people to share with me. I guess I sounded too cynical on the phone, which was a vicious cycle, because the closer I came to being fired, the more grumpy I got, and the fewer people I could convince to share their dirty secrets.”
Paul smiled. “I bet you were a formidable interviewer.”
“Want me to grill you about your darkest secrets and you can find out?”
“I’m an open book.”
“Not with that many dirty jokes floating around your brain.” I smiled at him, and he looked out the window again, holding something back. “What was the dirty joke you were going to say on the boat?”
He flushed a little, embarrassed. “I was just going to say I was sure you gave excellent head.”
“There,” I said. “Was that so hard?”
He laughed. “Technically, being hard would be the point, there.”
Neither of us looked at each other for the next minute or two, but I was flushed and grinning and I had a feeling he was, too.
Paul drove us slightly too fast up the coast on the way back north.
I had heard once that people’s real personality came out when they were driving, and Paul seemed more assertive, more confident behind the wheel of a car than he was the rest of the time.
He told me we were going to make one more stop at Cape Spear National Lighthouse, the easternmost point in North America.
“If that’s okay,” he added.
“Of course. As long as this is another noble sacrifice.”
“Always. I’m having a terrible time.” He gave me a warm look and then glanced back at the road.
We found a place in the small parking lot, which was mostly empty. At the end of a grassy bluff was a beautiful white lighthouse, set high up on cliffs. We had to shout at each other as we walked toward it, buffeted by the wind.
“Please don’t fall off!” Paul cried. “Lots of paperwork I’d have to fill out.”
“No promises. I sometimes get sudden whims to run off cliffs. Did I forget to tell you that?”
“It slipped your mind.”
“Well, you’ll just have to hope for the best! Oh wait…the impulse is coming upon me…”
“Right now?”
“I want to fly, Paul! I think I can fly!”
I dashed a few steps forward, and he raced to catch up with me and grabbed at my arm, swinging me around.
“Please don’t,” he said. “My heart can’t take it. I’m a schoolteacher. I spend too much time around kids who might actually do it.”
“What about following your impulses? Isn’t that big in improv comedy?”
“This is why we don’t do improv next to a cliff. Lisette would go right over, but it would get a big laugh.”
“Audience engagement would reach an all-time high.”
“This is the New York cynicism I was expecting.”
“I’m always New York cynical,” I replied. “It’s why I’m thirty-seven and alone.”
He raised his eyebrows and said nothing.
Now he knew my age, so that should put some distance between us.
Thirty-seven was the age at which you really did start to wonder if you were broken, and if you didn’t wonder, the men around you did, pointing it out to you on first dates.
I looked away from his gaze and toward the water, thinking that this was where the first ships would have come across the ocean from Europe.
The day was clear, and the ocean was frilled with white-capped waves that crashed onto some unseen shore below us.
When the wind died down for a moment, we could hear seagulls in the distance.
I caught his eye, feeling briefly like we were in a movie together.
“So, Newfoundland,” I said. “You do a nice job hiding this place.”
“Wait until winter. That’s when you’ll find out what it’s really like here.”
“If I stay that long.”
He nodded to himself.
On the drive back, I was silent for a long time, waiting for him to say something, watching the flicker of thoughts crossing his face. I kept making the same mistake, I thought. I kept thinking I could read him.
“So why improv comedy?” I said at last, managing to make my voice sound more cheerful than I felt.
He glanced at me and shrugged. “I did improv a bit in college, a couple of classes,” he said.
“And then when I met Lisette…she came to work in this restaurant I was working at over the summer. I usually work a summer job, but this year I’ve been dealing with some divorce stuff, but anyway.
Lisette worked with me for a few weeks, and we really clicked, but she had trouble keeping track of her schedule and the manager eventually fired her.
But we stayed in touch, and I thought—I guess I thought it would be good for her.
And me. I missed acting. I was afraid I would turn into one of those middle school teachers who acts out historical events for their students just so I can have an audience. ”
“Your students would love it if you brought in a sword.”
“They do enough damage to each other with pencils. Anyway, I hoped it would give Lisette somewhere to channel her energy, and it seems to have worked. She hasn’t lost another job since we started the Newfingers.”
“You really care about her.”
He nodded slowly. “Yeah, I do.”
“So the two of you…if you hadn’t been married at the time, would you have…”
“Oh, no. I couldn’t date Lisette. I don’t think that’s what she needs right now, anyway. I think she needs people who want her to be healthy and safe.”
“You’re a really good person,” I said.
“Oh, no,” he said, grimacing. “The death sentence.”
“I’m saying you’re amazing and you’re turning it into an insult?”
He shrugged. “I’m just like everybody else, only secretly much, much better.” He was smiling.
“I think you may be, though. You took me on a boat trip, and you definitely didn’t have to do that.”
“That’s a prank we play on visitors to see if we can make them sick.”
“To keep them from falling in love with this place?”
“Exactly right. Have to keep those property values low.” He looked out of the car window and didn’t say anything for a moment.
He pulled up his car in front of my rental apartment and got out to walk me to the door. We stood there for a moment. It felt like we had just been on a seven-hour date, and I didn’t want it to end yet. Except that it probably wasn’t a date, and he wasn’t going to kiss me.
“Serious question,” I said, “do you really not want me to come to improv practice? I won’t mind if you don’t.”
“Do you seriously want to come?”
“I kind of do.”
“Then I want you to be there.” He took a small step closer to me.
“Because I don’t have to come if you were just being polite,” I added.
“Thursday night, then. My place. 7:30 p.m.”
“Okay. Text me the address.”
“Give me your phone number.”
I did, and then on impulse I hugged him good-bye. He gave me a quick, surprised look and then wrapped his arms around me. He smelled like sea air and warmth, and I felt his thumb run across the top of my neck with one hand before he let me go.
“Hey, Abby?” His face looked surprisingly serious. “How long exactly are you planning to stay?”
Oh no. Did he think I was expecting to join his improv group forever? Did he think my intention was to weasel my way in?
“Don’t worry. I promise I won’t pull an All About Eve thing and try to steal the group from under you.”
He frowned, not taking the bait. “But do you have a timeline of when you’re going back?”
I shrugged, forcing a little laugh. “Probably a month or two. At some point, my sister’s going to break up with her ex-husband and I’ll have to fly back home to deal with that drama, so don’t even worry. I’ll be out of your lives by the fall, for sure.”
For some reason, he didn’t look relieved.
“Sure,” he agreed. “I’ll see you Thursday.” He turned to go. Whatever was bothering him didn’t seem to have gone away.
That night, as I ate dinner alone, I fixated on certain details—his hand on my wrist, certain expressions he had when he looked at me, the feel of his thumb running across the back of my neck as we hugged.
He’d had an opening to kiss me. Surely he knew that?
It felt even more embarrassing because I’d expressly told him I was leaving, so this wasn’t going to be a long-term thing where I’d come into it with high expectations.
I wasn’t even desirable enough for a quick fling, apparently.
Maybe he was still too hung up on his ex-wife?
Then I went back to a piece of advice that my sister Laura had told me when I was overanalyzing the behavior of a high school crush.
It was my sophomore year, and we were sitting in my bedroom late one night when she was home from her freshman year at college.
“I think this boy likes me,” I told Laura, “because he keeps walking really close to me, but he also walks close to Lily, so maybe he likes her, but then sometimes he talks to me about what he’s done over the weekend…
” I went on like that for several minutes before Laura finally stopped me with five words.
“Has…he…asked…you…out?”
“No.”
“Are you going to ask him out?”
“Not if he likes Lily.”
“Then don’t spend any more time thinking about it.”
She was right about that guy (who did indeed end up asking out my best friend), and she had been right several times since then.
Paul was a grown-up. If he was interested, he could ask me out.
If he wasn’t interested, he would see me only when we were part of a group.
Things would sort themselves out soon, I told myself.
The problem was that they didn’t.